The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Continued from page 2

“I wonder even if he has access to those Bitcoins. I’m completely speculating at this point, but I wonder if he didn’t destroy those keys. So those Bitcoins would be gone forever, same as if you had set fire to a hundred dollar bill.”

Brito hopes the silver lining in this is that, if he is proven to be the founder of Bitcoin, we can get past the cryptocurrency's mysterious origins story and just focus on its future.

And one other thing -- Brito thinks Bitcoin's creator should get a Nobel Prize. “It's brilliant. Whatever you may think about Bitcoin, he solved two very long-standing computer science problems that academics working in the field for decades have not been able to solve. And what he created is an incredibly elegant system. Technically, it's a masterpiece. Bill Gates says it's a technological tour de force, and he's right.”

Updated at 2:30pm March 6, 2014 with Goodman's response to privacy questions.